Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities.... I listen to them and they go away delighted.

It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.